The intellectual life is neither committed to Christianity nor does it antecedently reject it.* That it is not committed to Christianity is clear enough from history. Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, Moses Maimonides, Ibn Sina and Einstein were not Christians but no one would deny that they were scholars. That the Christian can be a scholar is just as plain. Abelard, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Erasmus, Newton and Newman were Christians and no one would deny that they were creative intellectuals.

It is well-known that the teachings of Marx and Lenin struck a response among those generally referred to as intellectuals. Among their most enthusiastic supporters in the countries which subsequently fell to communism may be found a long list of prominent writers, artists, scientists, even educators. Some of them, to be sure, were guided by sheer opportunism, jumping on what they took to be a band-wagon, but more joined because of misguided idealism. Some succumbed to the professed communist concern for the underdog and the inflated promises of better social justice; others wanted to register their protest against real or imaginary defects in the system under which they lived. Still others thought to uncover in the deterministic messianism and the apodictic claims of the Marxian Weltanschauung a safe-conduct through a world made uncertain by the awe-inspiring impact of modern technology with which liberal democracy seemed to be unable to cope.

If burma has needed to prove its right to be considered genuinely neutral in world affairs, it clearly did so in the first weeks of November 1956. At a time when it was engaged in crucial negotiations with Red China over Chinese incursions into its border territories, Burma chose to go on record in the United Nations and in the councils of the uncommitted Asian nations strongly condemning Russian aggression in Hungary along with the British, French and Israeli aggression in Egypt. Despite this, Burma to date has managed to hold its own in the Chinese negotiations.

Hobbes did not believe in ghosts. The old sceptic pointed out that ghosts always appear fully clothed—and the idea of the resurrection of a dead man's old clothes is really preposterous. But the ghost of Hobbes himself has haunted Europe for the last three centuries. Dr. Richard Peters, whose cool and pithy survey of the main compartments of Hobbes's thought was published last year,* obviously feels a wry affection for this tough old ghost where others have felt alarm and horror. The posthumous career of Thomas Hobbes at the hands of his enemies, critics, and commentators reveals a good deal about him and still more about them. Hobbes's system is like a big irregular diamond each of whose facets has brilliantly reflected the changing light focused on it. To examine the changing reception of Hobbes's ideas is one way—an eccentric but, I think, an enjoyable way—of looking at the larger changes in the intellectual climate of Europe during the last three centuries.

The history of world politics of the half century before 1914 is full of nationalist wars, imperialist conflicts, and the diplomacy of the armed peace. To the less spectacular developments of internationalism so little attention is usually paid that the League of Nations almost seems to emerge full-grown from the head of Woodrow Wilson. It is true that the dominant trend in the relations between the sovereign states was anything but pacific, and the peoples were increasingly swayed by the emotion of aggressive nationalism. At the same time the world was becoming more interdependent economically and culturally, and there was a quiet but clearly perceptible growth of international-mindedness. A significant expression of this development was the movement of ideas in the eighteen-seventies which led to the establishment of two important law societies, the Institute of International Law and the International Law Association. The story of their origins is an interesting chapter in the history of international law and throws light as well upon its relationships with the organized peace movement.